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Comment by papsosouid | Hacker News Reader

We have a bunch of sites that are almost entirely static, but have a php "contact us" email form. Right now they are some bloated PHP CMS thing, and I would really like to switch them over to being static. Does anyone know of a cheap service that provides a form to send email we could have our contact form POST to?

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I have helped a friend who does small, static marketing sites. In addition to needing a server for only thing (forwarding contact forms), I've noticed that mail from the low-end shared hosting her clients generally choose is extremely unreliable. So I've wondered if there was a need a service exactly like this. However it seemed so basic I thought... nah.

Is this a real pain point for enough people?

It is for me. I do mostly static sites for small business, and use embedded forms from jotform.com but would really prefer to be able simply to post the info to an external server which handles sending the email.

Implementing such a service would be almost trivial; I'm genuinely surprised this is something that people would need.

You could use Google Forms. Extract the POST URL,build your own static form and put the POST URL there. Then you query your data with Google Docs

So, this is not a service that sends email... but I sometimes use a Google Doc survey in that circumstance. There might be a way to get google doc to email you with the response every time someone submits one?

http://www.wufoo.com/examples/#contactform or a google docs form maybe.

Uhm, do you know you can do a post to a mailto: action with your form contents? The browser will open your email client the same as a mailto link.

http://www.w3schools.com/html/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_for...

How does this handle the majority of users who use webmail clients?

I'd be really curious to A/B test mailto versus contact form, but my gut is that fewer people would use a mailto.

Yes, but since half the people who contact us have no smtp server, that doesn't work out too well.

Not sure about operating system's other than Windows, but gmail (opens a compose window in a new window) is my "default" handler for mailto: links.

> Does anyone know of a cheap service

AppEngine would do this for free.

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